When dinner was over Mrs. Clarke said to the butler: 

“Osman will make the coffee for us.  He knows about it.  We shall have it in the pavilion.”

The butler, who, although a Greek, looked at that moment almost incredibly stolid, moved his rather pouting lips, no doubt in assent, and was gone.  They saw him no more that night.

They walked slowly from terrace to terrace of the climbing garden till they came to the height on which the pavilion stood guarded by the two mighty cypresses.  There was no moon, and the night was a very dark purple night, with stars that looked dim and remote, like lost stars in the wilderness of infinity.  From the terraces came the scent of flowers.  In the pavilion one hanging lamp gave a faint light which emphasized the obscurity.  It shone through colored panes and drew thick shadows on the floor and on sections of the divans.  The heaps of cushions were colorless, and had a strange look of unyielding massiveness, as if they were blocks of some hard material.  Osman stood beside one of the coffee-tables.

As soon as his mistress appeared he began to make the coffee.  Dion stayed upon the terrace, and Mrs. Clarke went into the pavilion and sat down.

The cypresses were like dark towers in the night.  Dion looked up at them.  Their summits were lost in the brooding purple darkness.  Cypresses!  Why had he thought of cypresses in England in connexion with Mrs. Clarke?  Why had he seen her standing among cypresses, seen himself coming to her and with her in the midst of the immense shadows they cast?  No doubt simply because he knew she lived much in Turkey, the land of the cypress.  That must have been the reason.  Nevertheless now he was oppressed by a weight of mystery somehow connected with those dark and gigantic trees; and he remembered the theory that the past, the present and the future are simultaneously in being, and that those who are said to read the future in reality possess only the power of seeing what already is on another plane.  Had he in England, however vaguely, however dimly, seen as through a crack some blurred vision of what was already in existence?  He felt almost afraid of the cypresses.  Nevertheless, as he stood looking up at them, his sense almost of fear tempted him to make an experiment.  He remained absolutely still, and strove to concentrate all his faculties.  After a long pause he shut his eyes.

“If the far future is even now in being,” he said mentally, “let me look upon it now.”

He saw nothing; but immediately he heard the sound of wind among pine trees, as he had heard it with Rosamund in the green valley of Elis.  It rose in the silent night, that long murmur of eternity, and presently faded away.

He shuddered and turned sharply towards the pavilion.

Osman had gone, and Mrs. Clarke was pouring the coffee into the tiny cups.

“There’s no wind, is there—­is there?” he asked her.